BackBlaze Reviews

Beware of long-term usage
1 Helpful

I have had Backblaze for a few years now, and at first I thought it was perfect. It still works... kind of. But after I reported slow backups, a tech support guy revealed to me that the lists of backup history are kept INSIDE the app folder, and they grow larger and larger as time goes on, and this slows the app down. The only way to fix the problem is to start a NEW backup, which means spending some time building up to a fully backed-up state again, during which time your files may be vulnerable.

To give you some idea of the size of the problem: my regular backup runs nightly between 0000 and 0700, and tonight I'm up after midnight so I'm watching the status on the preferences pane. It is now 0051, and it still says "Producing file lists" in the status. This means that it has spent almost an hour JUST DECIDING what to back up. Not a single file has been backed up yet. The thing is pretty much impossible to use during the day now because my whole machine slows down during that phase, which is why I schedule it overnight. But it's struggling, and sadly I think I may have to put it out to pasture and find an alternative system in which the designers have thought things through a bit better.

The perfect solution for stubborn mates

This is the program I suggest to family and friends. For some people, simply connecting an external drive and clicking "backup" once a week is too much work. Backblaze is cheap, only $5 a month for unlimited backup. It's simple, just install and it backs up everything, which means there's nothing to configure. It's automatic, always running in the background. It's the perfect solution for stubborn mates.

I recently switched to this from Spideroak. I set a private encryption key, and my only nitpick is that you must provide this password if you wish to restore your files.

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